Professor Marty Jaffee of the University of Washington (Emeritus) is a renowned scholar of the oral Torah and rabbinic Judaism. He received his Ph.D in Religious Studies from Brown University in 1980 and began teaching at the University of Washington in 1987. Over the course of three decades of teaching and publishing, he put the See full section »
Sifre Devarim
A new translation of the 4th-century rabbinic oral commentaries on Deuteronomy
This new translation of the tannaitic midrash Sifre Devarim by Professor Emeritus Marty Jaffee of the University of Washington emphasizes the oral performative dimension of the text.
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Book Description
Professor Marty Jaffee’s new translation of the tannaitic midrash, Sifre Devarim, a 4th-century compilation of rabbinic oral commentaries on Deuteronomy, uniquely captures the spoken dimension of the original text.
Previous translators were rightly concerned with the accurate negotiation of meaning between rabbinic Hebrew and modern English, but neglected the text’s social matrix in an oral-performative milieu. This new translation brings a fresh and often poetic perspective to the work.